It's a familiar situation: you're halfway out the door when you realize the gadget you just pocketed is utterly out of juice. The FreePlay ZipCharge battery can give you precious extra hours of life with a mere 60 second charge.

It's not quite as sleek as some other batteries, like the HyperMac Nano, but the FreePlay ZipCharge is for when you need juice and you need it fast.

The company claims that charging the battery for 60 seconds will give you 2 hours of iPod playback and 8 hours of standby on your phone, or 15 minutes of talk time. A 10 minute charge, they say, will give you 10 hours of talk time or 20 hours of playback on your MP3 player. The kit comes with 8 different adapters for charging all manner of gadgets from big name brands.

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The £49.95 super battery, which charges 4 times faster than a lithium-ion counterparts, gets its power from "clever nano physics stuff that you need a very big forehead to understand," though the 850mAh ZipCharge can only give your device of choice one full charge, as opposed to the 1800mAh HyperMac Nano which can do so almost twice over.

We'll be reviewing the ZipCharge soon to see if it lives up to its claims. It's only available in the UK for now, with a US-compatible version coming in the next few months, but if you're a UK resident sick of dead (device) weight pulling down your pockets, you can order a ZipCharge now at CuteBitz.

clever nano physics stuff that you need a very big forehead to understand.